Hey there Sponge community, I am a long time Bukkit/Spigot plugin developer (going on 4 years) and I decided to finally come over here to see what all the hype was about!
Though, to start, I just had a simple question:
I can’t stand the looks of the current Java IDEs, is there nothing like atom.io that has native support for Java such as Eclipse, while maintaining the updated/good looking interface?
If you have an recommendations, let me know. 
The ones mostly used by the sponge community should be IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse.
I’d suggest one of these two to get yourself started on sponge, as the support you can get here might be best when encountering any problems while setting your ide up for development. Or if you have any problems with importing of dependencies or gradle/maven.
I’ll just throw a link to your docs at you for now 
https://docs.spongepowered.org/en/plugin/basics/workspace/index.html
PS: Welcome aboard, have a nice stay 
IntelliJ is a fabulous, fantastic program.
Recently, @mbaxter and I have been researching several methods of possible reproduction-based romanticism with the IntelliJ Java IDE.
As clearly stated above, if you want a good looking IDE IntelliJ is the way to go, i don’t personally use it for my mod development but i use android studio which is basically IntelliJ with some added Google tweaks for android development
Tl;dr; IntelliJ is your best option
I can recommend Intellij as well, i tried Netbeans, Eclipse as well, but Intellij was easy to use yet powerful. It also looks really nice in my opinion.
In case you need a small guide on how to debug your plugins with breakpoints and all the fancy stuff, i can recommend my own guide over here. It’s much easier than the way stated in the docs, which requires you to have sponge running as a seperate project.
Also you can use Intellij for everything (limited in Community though) including: Java, PHP, Javascript, Golang, Haxe etc.
Haven’t found a language Intellij doesn’t support. In case you open a file with not yet installed extension, Intellij just shows a small window to install the plugin you need. So you don’t even need to look for a markdown plugin, Intellij offers you to install it when you open a .md file.
Support for Maven,Gradle etc. is out of the box and really good.
Thats not exactly true, you should reread the license. 200€ seems to be lot of money but its worth.
you can also use visual studio (but last good visual studio microsoft relased was 2008, the newer ones are slow crap.
or this Visual Studio Code - Code Editing. Redefined
i was using it on linux for c++, some features were good some werent at least it was fast but clion is much better
I mentioned that the “everything” feature is limited in the Community Edition, there are still alot of plugins that are working for other languages. CLion is awesome for C/C++ development, but IIRC it will be available soon as Intellij Plugin.
I will be checking Intellj out, thanks for the help everyone!
And thanks for the welcomes!
I cant pick between Intelij and Eclipse so I use both… However it gives me many formatting issues when sending it to GitHub but its worth it IMO. Both have pluses and negatives. When I get bored of one I use the other… The only big difference is Intelij is a bit more laggy because there are so many graphics that come up when typing